Monday, October 13, 2014

I'll be taking a quick break from our coast trip this past July to preview some of the spots Dana, B. and I visited on our geogalavanting last week. Anne Jefferson introduced us to Upper Proxy Falls last year on her hydrology tour of the upper McKenzie, and I had been back to it with Hollie Oakes-Miller later in the summer, but I had never gone down to the lower falls. Oh. My. It is completely glorious. The upper viewpoint is quick and easy to get to, and I was content to just sit and space out at the beauty of the thing while Dana and B. scrambled down for a closer view near the base. It's not easy to get a sense of scale here; this spot is probably about a fifth to a quarter of a mile from the base of the falls. However, according to this source, the drop is 226 feet. This is an excellent example of a hanging valley. While a large glacier gouged out the valley I'm sitting in, a much smaller tributary glacier didn't incise as deeply in that side drainage. As a result, the stream courses down a side valley, then drops over the sheer side into the larger valley. The topo map at the link shows the landform quite well.